Poverty Is Not an Accident

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

I don't like pharmaceuticals, but that doesn't make me stupid

Reply to a thread on drugs, pharmaceuticals and the Big PhRMA lobby influence on medicine:

Max, you didn't address your comments, so nobody knows to whom you are speaking. If you're chastising me, please look up my blog on living in poverty, http://livinginthehood.blogspot.com I live in so-called "Third World" conditions, without heat, sewage, running water or transportation, 7 miles from the nearest food and a hundred miles from DECENT food. Most of my neighbors in this rural community are undocumented immigrants from Mexico (we're about 300 miles from the border).

As a person with behavioral health challenges (brain injuries, post traumatic stress), I find your comments about brains and intelligence very prejudiced, stigmatizing, abusive and dismissive. I know what Big PhRMA's agenda is regarding wholesale "diagnoses" of the general population is: so they can peddle very dangerous drugs, especially to children. My position comes from knowing about that damage. You can learn more by searching The Icarus Project, MindFreedom.org and PsychRights.org, among others. No, I am not grateful to a corporate-influenced medical industrial complex that is, more and more, putting profit ahead of people. Peer review means nothing if all the "peers" are on the take to Big PhRMA.

I also notice your posts constantly use the words "men and man." We women have contributed much to the healing arts throughout the centuries, usually without regard to personal gain and, in fact, have been murdered as witches for our dedication, and our books and journals burned. I have a police report on file, in which an officer "diagnosed" me as a paranoid schizophrenic and a "self proclaimed witch," because I explained I am a Curandera, a traditional healer in Mexican tradition, and because I would not allow them to enter my property without a search warrant. They were there because the neighborhood association north of our slum complained about the fact that I allowed the neighborhood children to hold a Powwow in my front yard, at which many other neighbors arrived to drum, dance, eat fry bread & Navajo tacos, and feel like a neighborhood, instead of the "War Zone" our ghetto was called. I allowed every kid in the neighborhood to come to my home after school and on weekends. Several of them went to college as a result and attribute their successes to my intervention in their lives. That's curing.